Hello,
I'm Gavin Hoey and today I'm going
to be making one of Mark's photos much,
much better...
I don't actually do a lot of
retouching in my own work,
but I'm gonna give this a go,
and see if we can have
some fun with it.
To me... this is done.
All right so here's the thing...
when I ended up sitting down and
editing I got all types of distracted.
In this episode... I'll be joined by some very
special guests to talk about their
approach to retouching photos.
Hi everybody,
welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on Adorama TV.
I'm Mark Wallace, and you can
tell that I am in a hotel room, that's
because I'm in quarantine in Buenos
Aires Argentina.
The whole city's on lockdown,
and so I've set up sort of a
makeshift studio here, because I am
determined to create no matter what..
and so in this episode I want to talk to you
about photo retouching, and specifically
the approach that I take to figuring out
which photos I want to retouch, and then
how I begin and figure out how I'm gonna
make those come out in the end, and
because this is something that is done
differently by different people, I've
asked other Adorama TV hosts, and a
special guest to join me to explain
their approach to photo retouching.
It's gonna be sort of fun, so stick around
for that, well I think we can talk about this
in terms of well this apple, I think this
apple can teach us some things about
retouching photos, now if I got this
apple off a tree or in the supermarket I
could eat it just like it is and it's
gonna be delicious, but I could also
slice this up put some peanut butter on
those slices and that's gonna be pretty
yummy too, I could make this into an
apple pie, or maybe you make some apple
cider or apple juice, all of them are
good, there is no right or wrong there
are just different ways to eat and enjoy
this apple, now photography is the same
way, we can work in the studio or on
location to make sure that we get the
images just right in camera,
so that when we pick them, they're ready
to eat just like this apple right off the tree,
or we can think ahead and think you know what,
I don't want to just have an apple that
I eat, I want to make this into an apple
pie, I want to take an a photo in the
studio that I know that I'm going to do
some retouching too, and then I'm going
to expose and do some different things
because of the technique I'm going t
apply later, and both things are
fun, and both things are right,
there's no right or wrong way to do this.
Now this conversation came up because
of the last episode that I published,
and that was one lighting setup that had many
different looks, and in that video I went
straight from the stuff that was in
camera that I was showing and
went straight to the published photos
which were radically different, them
people said hey what the heck happened
here you showed us pictures that were
sort of underexposed to now all the
sudden they're beautiful, how did you get
from one to the other, well it has to do
with the approach I took to retouching
those images, so I want to show you sort
of my philosophy and then we're going to
jump over and have some other Adorama TV hosts
show us their philosophies, so let me
first show you the images from that
photo shoot.
So I've selected a six of
these photos because they basically fall
into two different categories, and so
what I did was I had a lighting setup
where I intentionally underexposed
things, because I knew what I was going
to be doing in post-production would
make these beautiful, so here is one, two,
three images that were all underexposed,
and then I have this image here... very,
very high contrast, so I'm thinking ahead
in the studio, this is something I
probably want to convert to black and
white, and then I had some more high-key
images that I shot that I knew that
would be more traditionally retouched
images, so let me just walk you through
one of these images, so I'm going to show
you how I got from this image, to this
image, to this image, they're all the same
image, so we'll begin with this middle
image here, this is the virtual copy,
these are the adjustments that I made in
lightroom, and you can see I didn't do a
lot to this, all I did was I changed the
white balance, I changed the exposure
just a bit, and then I changed the
highlights, shadows, whites and blacks to
make sure that those were tonality was
really really nice, then I also went down
here, and I desaturated the orange just a
little bit, I could have stopped right
there.
This looks pretty good, but I wanted to
do some more things to that, so I took
this photo and I opened it in Photoshop
so we'll just zip over there.
Here's the image in Photoshop, what I did here is I
took this layer and I went to Filter Nik
Collection Analog Effects Pro, and just
hopped right in there now in Analog
Effects Pro, we can take a look here, I
only did some very basic things,
I did some basic adjustments,
so I could get a little more contrast,
and brightness out of this, the really
significant thing,
though was adding this bokeh, so some
artificial bokeh when I created this
where I could move this around, so I
could repeat process on the other images,
and you can see that makes the her body her
shoulders sort of fade out and gets sort
of soft, and then I also added a film
type, now this film type changes the
tonality, so it went from sort of a
normal traditional look here, to more of
this greenish blue, and that I really
like that, so this is the image right
here after that is applied, and then I
went in here, and I did some corrections
to her skin, so you can see I turned this
layer off and on, there's some very, very
minor correction, she's got great skin so
I didn't have to do much, the only other
thing I did was she has this finger here
that when I cropped the image in
Lightroom I noticed it was just too
bright, it was distracting and so I made
another layer and I took the tonality of
that finger down, alright so once that
was done I saved that, and then in
Lightroom I have the image that go to
the develop module I then applied the
crop in Lightroom, and you can see it's
just a beautiful crop when you get in
really, really close, and I did that
because I wanted to go fullscreen, and
really show a beautiful beautiful image.
Alright that's what I did to this image,
but what I wanted to do was challenge
some of my fellow Adorama TV hosts and a
good friend of mine Martin Higgs to do
this for themselves, and so what I did
was I selected eight images, so here are
the eight images 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ,6, 7, 8
and I told them, I put this out on a folder
on a Dropbox folder,
and I told everybody, I said hey here are
the rules, you can do anything you want
to these images, there are no
restrictions, you can crop, you can use
any editing software you want, you can
convert to black and white, you can over
saturate, you can do compositing,
I don't care, do whatever you want, but you have
to do two things for us...
Number 1..
explain why you chose the photo that you
chose, and then show us at a very,
very high level, what you did to that photo,
and the results are pretty spectacular,
and so we're going to begin with a
photographer who I absolutely love, his
post post-processing, his name is Martin
Higgs, he does this really high fashion,
mostly hair photography, and just some
amazing stuff, so his Instagram feed is
in the description of this video, you
really want to check that out, and so
Martin, without further ado...
Show us what you did?
Hi Mark, it's Martin from the
UK here, I've accepted your challenge and
picked image 7, reason I picked this
was I really like the composition, and
the lighting, and I think I'm gonna make
there's a nice black and white image, so
let's go through and get rid of any
blemishes in the background, getting rid
of some cotton, as I can see hanging from
the top, then I'll do with a bit of skin
blemish removal, just a quick one, nothing
in Photoshop today, this is Lightroom,
and I go off into my beauty editing software,
this is, just makes life really quick for me,
so it's portrait Pro Studio 19, I'm just
going through, and I'm brightening up the
eyes, adding a little bit makeup,
softening the skin just a little,
there we go, then I'm going into Silver
Effects Pro 2, pick my black and white,
course there's millions of different
combinations here, I just go with what i
feel at the time.
There we go, adding a vignette in a second,
here we go,
and then just checking that the whites
have got plenty of detail in them, still
there's still lots of texture in the top.
Applying some tone differences, and
there's the final image, which took eight minutes.
Hey Vanessa Joy here with Adorama,
well you know that because this
is Mark's video, so let's get editing.
Now normally i would have chosen to edit in
Capture One, I actually prefer editing in
Capture One, but because these photos are
of someone's face and I didn't really
feel like going into Photoshop because
Lightroom is just faster, and I can
retouch in Lightroom,
I decided to use Lightroom for this.
The first thing I did
was just apply an import setting or a
preset that I typically use called
Joyfully Simple...
Now Joyfully Simple just
has a few settings that I know, I like a
little bit of contrast, a little bit
crunching the blacks really cleans it up,
lowers the clarity to help smooth the
skin out, but no preset is really going
to get your image to the final spot you
want it to be, so use a preset if you
want to to get you started off, and then
do some moving around.
Moving on from there I went into my local
adjustment brushes,
and here's where I just decided
to clean up some of the shine a little
bit under the eyes, some of the
imperfections, don't even want to say
imperfections because you know what this
girl's gorgeous,
Oh it's just some of the things that we
wanted to smooth out, and
you can do that right there in Lightroom.
And from there I just decided to play
around, you know when it comes to editing
photos, especially someone else's photos.
Sometimes I use presets to get a
different feel of base point and
something will pop out at me,
and like, oh yeah, that's how I want to edit that.
I don't do it much for weddings because
weddings, they need to create something
consistent you know from start to
over the course of 800, 900, 1,000 or
more images, so I'm not doing that for
weddings, but for something like this,
hey might as well have a little bit of fun.
So here are my images,
and you know the whole process
I went through to get there, and get it
done, and now I'm kind of excited to see
everyone else's.
Hey Mark, I chose this image because I
love the warmth and contrast of it, so
because of that I'm just gonna basically
amplify that...
Again, I love the way it looks,
so what I'm gonna do is #1 though,
I am gonna do a quick crop on it,
I think being a little tighter will
benefit this one, it'll work a little bit
nicer for me, in addition to that I'm
basically it's gonna grab the levels,
this is my go-to for most times where I
want to add some contrast.
I'm just gonna kind of what I'd call crunch,
the, the blacks in to make it a little darker.
I'm gonna bring the lights up,
that's in contrast and the I am going to
tweak my mids to get it
basically where I like it.
Aow it looks really nice, one thing that
you will find though when you push me,
when you crunch the blacks a lot, is that
you will end up with kind of an
oversaturated image, and because of that
I'm just gonna drop the overall
saturation a little bit, and yeah I mean
that is basically all I would do here.
I think, it's a nice clean image out of
camera, it works for me, there's kind of like
super bright highlights, but I love that,
so to me this is done.
Here's the thing - when I ended up sitting
down and editing,
I got all types of distracted, because I
started messing with my presets, and, and
then I ended up with three different
versions of what I thought I could edit
here, so I've got three different looks
but ultimately it's the same retouching,
just a different type of vibe.
I definitely have my favorite of all of
these, so that's my final submitted one,
but it's just interesting how easily we
can get side tracked, at least for me with
editing, and it tells me how important it
is to just have a style that you stick
to, that you become recognized by and not
to get lost in all the editing, because
really that can be absolutely endless.
So happy editing, and also I want to say
happy editing...
Hey Mark Wallace it's
David Bergman, thanks for bringing me
into this retouch challenge.
I don't actually do a lot of retouching in my
own work, but I'm gonna give this a go
and see if we can have some fun with it.
So these eight images you sent - this is
the one that really jumps out at me,
I just have facial expression, it's really
dramatic and it really draws me in so
let's go ahead and work with that, I'm
gonna bring it in to Capture One, which
is my RAW converter of choice, the main
thing I'm gonna do here is, I'm gonna
crop it dramatically, if I was shooting
this image myself I would have shot it a
lot tighter I would give myself options
so it shoot it both ways, but by doing
that it really draws you, and you're not
distracted, and then as far as other
things in the RAW conversion, really
all it needs I think is a vignette, which
the backgrounds really kind of flat, I
like vignettes in my images it draws
your eye right into the middle of the
frame where you want it to be, that's all
I'm gonna do in here.
So then I'm going to open it with portrait
professional which is an incredible
program for doing retouching for guys like
me who don't do a lot of this really
detailed work.
It gives me a good chance to just do it,
overall all you have to do is click the
nose and the chin.
The software's gonna find the face,
it does a really good job in that,
and then as soon as I get my presets up,
here you can go in and manually adjust
every single setting if you like,
but it's got some really great presets.
so I'm gonna use maximum
lighting and that's gonna clean up a lot
of things there especially on her skin,
I'm gonna turn off the face sculpt
thing, we don't need to change the shape
of her face, she looks beautiful as it is,
the only other thing I think I'm gonna
do here is bring out her eye color.
If I like brighten the Iris,
it really makes her eyes pop,
you can change the color of the eyes,
you can do all kinds of things here
if you want to, but I'm not gonna do any of
that, if we go back to what our original
looks like - here it is, there, and this
image here is our after, so quite a
dramatic difference Mark.
Thanks so much for bringing me in...
I'll see you soon buddy.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey,
and today I'm gonna be making one of
Mark's photos much much better,
actually that's not what he asked
us to do, but nonetheless I've chosen
this picture because I love the symmetry
of it, and I think it's got some great potential.
With the current restrictions,
I can't bring people into my studio but
I can do it virtually, so my plan is
photograph my studio background.
Superimpose that onto the image Mark
sent m,e but I need to light the
background, and today I have a choice I
could use a magnum reflector, or a small
softbox but I want to do this like Mark
would, so which one of these two would be
one of Mark's favorite light modifiers...
and this magnum reflector right here - I
have a Magnum reflector here,
so this is a magnum reflector, so one of my favorite
light modifiers, this is a Profoto
Magna reflector, magnum reflector it is
then so what I've done in Photoshop is
I've put my studio background over the
top of the image Mark sent me,
use the overlay blending mode to sort of
merge them together, added a layer mask
and just masked away any texture from the
model skin, and put a bit of a background
blur, for a bit of depth of field effect too.
Then I thought maybe a little bit of
toning would work well, so I've used a
color lookup table to add a bit of green
and another one to add a bit of orange,
the whole thing just feels a little bit
out of balance after that,
so I've gone back into Camera Raw,
where I've added a bit of contrast,
knocked the colors back a
little bit, and also toned down the white
top that she's wearing,
and finally cropped it, so it's a more of
a nice horizontal rather than the
standard shot, for a bit more of a
cinematic look and feel, and with a
couple of tweaks and adjustments there it
is. Thats my final picture completed.
Alright well that was a ton of fun,
I love the different approaches different
people took to editing these photos.
Some people did that really really fast,
some people took a little bit longer,
some were black and white, some are
highly saturated, you get the idea the
thing is pick an image based on what
you're going to do to it, and then follow
that thought till the very end, and don't
be afraid to play because any image can
become really multiple different things,
and they all can be good just like our
apple, we can make a bunch of things,
they're all yummy, well I hope you
learned something, I certainly did, and
thank you so much for joining me for
this episode.
Don't forget to subscribe
to AdoramaTV,
because we're making new
videos every single day even during this
difficult time because again,
we are committed to 'create no matter what'
and to help you do the same.
I also encourage you to follow me on Instagram.
I'm always posting behind the scenes
photos and videos of what I'm up to.
You can ask me questions,
and we have a little dialogue
going on there, it's really a lot of fun.
Again thanks for joining me,
and I will see you again next time.